1.21 jiggawatts! —

NVIDIA announces Kepler-based Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac Pro

Ships later this year for $2,249.

NVIDIA has announced the Quadro K5000 for Mac, its next-generation workstation-class graphics card for Mac Pro users. The new top-end card for video and graphics professionals supports up to 4K resolutions, the latest OpenGL and OpenCL standards, and promises to run "key content creation applications" twice as fast as the aging Quadro 4000.

The Quadro K5000 for Mac promises to change all that. Built around NVIDIA's latest "Kepler" architecture, the double-wide card boasts 1536 processing cores shuffling pixels at up to 173GB/s along a 256-bit path to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The card supports Shader Model 5.0, Open GL 3.2 on Mac OS X, and Open GL 4.3 and DirectX 11 when running Windows under BootCamp. And, it can support up to four monitors: two running at 2560x1600 over dual-link DVI ports, and two running up to 4096x2160 over DisplayPort 1.2. All that power also fits within an Energy Star-rated 122W power envelope.

That translates into serious—yet efficient—real-wold performance, it seems. "The NVIDIA Quadro K5000 has great OpenGL and CUDA performance, so it's ideal to use as a shared GUI and image processing GPU in DaVinci Resolve 9," Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty said in a statement. "Like many artists who use DaVinci Resolve, colorists seek the highest performance possible from their systems, and with just one of the new Kepler GPUs our users will be able to work with 4K imagery on their Mac Pros in real time."

It has seemed for a long while that Apple may have let the Mac Pro run fallow, with pro users increasingly worried that no future hardware updates would ever appear. Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested in June that an update worth a three-year wait would materialize in 2013, but in the meantime, the Quadro K5000 should provide pro users a significant performance boost.

The Quadro K5000 for Mac is slated to begin shipping "later this year" from resellers and system integrators—it's not clear if it will be directly available from Apple—with pricing starting at $2,249.